GK spoke with Yoshiyuki Sankai, President and CEO of Cyberdyne Inc., about how the company is transforming healthcare with HAL technology and addressing labor shortages through robotics.
In terms of Japanese innovation and its concept of Monozukuri, what is it that gives the country a competitive advantage against other regional competitors?
Due to the aging population of Japan, there is a strong need to develop solutions for the future that can better support people and society. The declining labor force is a significant social problem, but this challenge also presents an important opportunity for our country; it stimulates the innovation of automation technologies, allowing manufacturers to run as normal with reduced staff.
Japanese Monozukuri culture is different from other regional competitors’ manufacturing industries in that it focuses more on how products will complement daily life. In Japan, there is a strong sense of community, and manufacturers are thereby encouraged to develop products that improve the lives of their users, such as in the medical, lifestyle, and well-being fields, to allow them to productively participate in society.
Could you tell us about HAL and your company’s role in improving the level of healthcare in the medical industry?
Healthcare extends beyond the immediate treatment of patients at hospitals and clinics. In line with this idea, we have developed systems that can support a person throughout their lifetime, whether that be in the workplace, in the hospital, or even as we grow older.
One such system is our Wearable Cyborg HAL, which helps patients who have suffered injuries and disease regain motor function and improve their prognosis. HAL can detect the patient’s voluntary initiation of movement in the form of bioelectrical signals, regardless of whether or not they are too faint or erratic to produce joint movement on their own.
In a clinical trial using HAL for Medical Use Lower Limb Type, 55 patients with chronic spinal cord injury nearly doubled their walking speed on average after a three month course of treatment using HAL. However, HAL also goes beyond the boundaries of what is traditionally considered medicine, and enters a more social realm of issues that we face.
Elderly persons who are simply frail are able to regain independence using HAL Lumbar Type; being able to stand and get out of bed on their own. Various nursing care homes have reported improved independence of elderly persons, leading to wider adoption of this technology. These efforts at prevention and wellness are in gray areas of healthcare that do not get enough attention, and we are shining light on its significance to incentivize greater funding and research for innovative solutions in this space.
What is it that has allowed you to gain such a reputation, and what is your company’s competitive advantage?
At the time of our founding, there was not an established market for our products to enter into, nor were there doctors as professional users who were trained with this kind of technology. There were no applicable industry regulations that were ready for our technology. While other innovative products, such as EVs, already had an enormous existing customer base of motorists, we had to convert all the “no” to “new” and form the Cybernics Industry from zero. This was a huge challenge initially, but through hard work and creative innovation, we have established ourselves as the industry’s pioneers.
In this sense, one of our philosophies is to change the ‘no’ to ‘new’. To do this, we have also become experts in regulation, working with organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization to establish the requirements that need to be met by manufacturers for global dissemination. Although recently the situation has been changing, Japan still enforces strict regulations on all medical products, whether they be drugs, physical devices, or software. We have spent a lot of time discussing these strict regulations on safety and ethics, all the while making sure to meet the requirements, and this interaction has helped us establish the high reputation we have today.
